So recently I have been diying some shirts... two to be exact... so I'm going to show you my methods and give you some tips as I go along.
For these projects the general supplies you are going to want...
Plain t-shirts, I got mine from AC Moore
Fabric Paint
A potato (only for one of them)
Scissors
A knife
My first shirt...
I actually got this idea from this YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xj8_yW_RSPI
that is doen by a German guy but I picked up on the general idea which is...
using a potato to create a stamp to use for a shirt. I fell in love with this idea but upon failure of his way I reinvented it into something that I thinks is a little easier.
So here is my potato... if you wanted to see...
And because I am a terrible artist I printed out a silhouette of a bird (the object I wanted to stamp out) and resized it. If you are a good artist a Sharpie would be the tool that you would want to use.
The bird silhouette can be found
here if you would like to use it.
If you watched the video you'll see that he used managed to cut out his design with one side of the potato still attached which makes it easier to stamp but I tried that and I failed miserably so I just cut a slice of the potato, put the cut out bird print out on top and used a knife to cut it out.
Because a potato is water filled and moist I let mine dry out for a while so that the potato water wouldn't make the paint watery.
And then once you have your stamp just squirt out some paint, put your stamp in and just place it on your shirt. You can either place them in a desgin like I did or you can just place it all over randomly with wil make it look like a print.
Some tips for when you are stamping:
Test your stamp first on some paper just to get the feel keeping in mind that the amount of paint that will ooze on paper will be okay on the shirt and the edges will not ooze.
Be careful to not put your fingers onto your shirt as you will most likely have paint on them and you don't want those paint dots
To make sure your silhouettes aren't too spacey press down on the stamp to make sure the paint is coming of the potato. I kind of liked the whole not entirely solid look but if you really wanted it to be solid you could go in afterwards with a paint brush and touch it up.
The next one took me a lot longer and I honestly don't like it as much.
For this the first step is to print out the design/words that you are going to want. Making sure they are the correct size. To save ink you can change the font color to a light gray. This is really helpful.
You are them going to want to cut out the inside of the letters or the design so that you are left with an outline. To do this I'd recommend that you first poke holes in the letters with scissors. This will allow you to put your scissors in the middle of the letter to cut the letter out.
You'll use that fancy scissor technique where you open them up all the way so that they are just blades...
And them cut them out...
And then the pain staking task of taping down all the outlines so that you can paint. Masking tape is the best kind of tape for this.
And then take your fabric paint or in my case Fabric Paint markers and fill in the spaces. If you're using fabric paint a sponge brush is the best type of brush.
And them take off the paper and ta da!
Apparently as I found out after the fact is that instead of using paper and tape as an stencil you can use freezer paper and iron it onto the shirt with get rids on the taping aspect and will give you more clean lines. That is if it works. I haven't tried it I am really excited to.
Make sure to make it your own and if you try out the whole freezer paper thing make sure to comment and tell me how it went.
